Philip Deming, Ph.D.
I study emotion, psychopathy, and the brain.
e•mo•tion noun : 1 how the brain makes sense of the body in the world. 2 a state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.
psy•chop•a•thy noun : a personality disorder marked by a deceitful interpersonal style, callousness towards others, recklessness, and frequent criminal behavior.
I study the many ways a human brain can create emotion. Human brains create emotions to serve the brain’s main goal – to predict the body’s needs and meet them before they arise. I am currently using novel methods – including 7 Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and physiologically-triggered experience sampling – to uncover how the brain accomplishes this.
People with psychopathy report feeling little in the way of emotion. Their impact on society is destructive. They commit a large share of crimes and often repeat their crimes after being legally punished. My research has shown that psychopathy is (most likely) not caused by altered activity in so-called ’emotion’ regions of the brain. Rather, psychopathy appears to be related to disrupted interactions between large-scale brain networks that serve core functions, including sensing and regulating the body.
On this site you’ll find my scientific publications, along with plain-English explanations of my research.
About me
I got my bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. My home-state university was home to two experts on psychopathy, Dr. Joe Newman and Dr. Mike Koenigs. As an undergraduate, I learned from Dr. Newman about the different theories that attempt to explain what causes psychopathy. I was hooked.
After graduation I began studying psychopathy in a sample of incarcerated men in Dr. Koenigs’ lab. Men in this sample had varying levels of psychopathy, from rather low to very high. In the prisons, I collected brain data in a mobile MRI scanner, and interviewed participants to assess their level of psychopathy.
I continued as a Ph.D. student in Dr. Koenigs’ lab. I tackled questions about what is considered to be a core symptom of psychopathy, namely difficulty guessing another person’s emotions (lack of empathy). To better understand this symptom, I studied what happens in psychopathic people’s brains using fMRI, and what happens in their bodies by measuring changes in their facial muscles, heart rate, and the sweatiness of their palms. I also took a bird’s-eye view: I meta-analyzed and reviewed hundreds of studies to find the brain regions that have been linked to psychopathy.
By the time I finished my PhD, I had come to realize that emotions are not built into specialized brain circuits. In order to understand emotion, we need new methods for capturing the many ways the human brain creates emotions in service of meeting the body’s needs before they arise.
So I joined the lab of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Dr. Karen Quigley as a postdoc to develop those new methods. We use physiologically-triggered experience sampling – where we strap heart monitors onto participants, send them about their day, and ask them questions about their emotions and the circumstances when their heart rate changes substantially – to examine how people make sense of their bodily signals. We also use 7 Tesla fMRI to examine how very small brain structures – like brainstem nuclei and cortical layers – interact during emotional experiences. For my NIMH-funded postdoctoral fellowship, I am testing how interactions between these small brain structures give rise to negative emotions, which are a symptom of many mental illnesses.